Glacial WebObs performance

Just in case you don't know it, WebObs is taking a very long time to process manual inputs. It just took me five minutes to get a confirmation of a single DSLR entry. I guess it's a good thing that last night was a disaster and I don't have 20 or 30 observations to enter. . .

I feel your pain, SFS. I've been plagued by the often unacceptibly slow functioning of WebObs manual input process for a long time now, but it has become noticeably worse following the recent system adjustments down-time.

Not only am I finding WebObs functioning very slowly at least 30% of the time, but I'm also encountering total freeze-ups necessiating that I log off and sign in again! A few days ago it took me over 90 minutes to enter about 60 observations because of multiple delays. This is the only site that I frequent where I encounter any such problems, so the difficulty must be in the AAVSO's system, not my machine, or server.

I feel your pain, SFS. I've been plagued by the often unacceptibly slow functioning of WebObs manual input process for a long time now, but it has become noticeably worse following the recent system adjustments down-time.

Not only am I finding WebObs functioning very slowly at least 30% of the time, but I'm also encountering total freeze-ups necessiating that I log off and sign in again! A few days ago it took me over 90 minutes to enter about 60 observations because of multiple delays. This is the only site that I frequent where I encounter any such problems, so the difficulty must be in the AAVSO's system, not my machine, or server.

Last week, a domain provider problem resulted to our web pages being down for a while (please look at relevant post). I wouldn't be surprised if this affected the speed of apps (like webobs) which are connected to our web page. A (partial) history of the problem is listed here:

I understand your frustration; we are frustrated too, and we are looking into the problem. Thank you for your patience while we are trying to understand the cause of this issue. Needless to say, we will be changing our web page domain provider soon (the transition shouln't cause any disruptions to our web page operations).

I remain skeptical that a DNS problem can explain the behavior that many are seeing. The website itself is usually speedy enough, it's when you hit the button to add data to the database that is slow (often many minutes)... so slow I tried it twice one time and ended up with duplicate entries!

Perhaps the architeture of adding data live rather than queuing such requests has lived out its practicality.

Is there anyone performing Will's former duties these days or are we operating on a best able basis. I must say as someone who manages data in my day job for astronomers at a university, it worries me if no one is taking care of the safe keeping of the database.

Starting in August, we started a collaboration with the American Astronomical Society for our web site needs. Their webmaster/IT team (led by Scott Idem) have already worked on improving our site’s security protocols (which was a priority post-Drupal update) and are now working on our database speed. You are right, the problem seems to be more complicated than the DNS one. AID has exceeded 31 million points now, and improvements are necessary as the database is expanding. We will keep you posted as we find out more details – for now, I am letting Scott and his team do their magic…

Our web page is in excellent hands. Again, I appreciate your patience as we are working towards improving our web page and database performance. I hope we can count on your help when we will need to test WebObs in the very near future…

Thanks Stella for updating (some of us) on how the website and AID is being managed at present. Hopefully they will find a solution that don't mean needing to overhaul they way things are presently architected.

Well, I had expressed my reservations about moving from in-house servers to outside website vendors back when the transition was made. There were some advantages pointed out to doing this, but you do lose control of things, and must then depend on outside support to fix performance problems.

Bashing AAVSO IT staff like this, is of no use under these circumstances!

Given the massive computing power and storage now available for very reasonable cost, maybe we should reconsider hosting our own webservers again?

Just another report for whoever will look into this. WebObs individual submission is very slow right now. The website itself is fairly slow too but WebObs takes a long time (in the order of a couple of minutes) for the entry form to load and for the response to be received upon entry.